It is no secret that dealing with health problems, especially chronic and incurable health problems, is a battle. Every single day is different than the next and while your body is fighting whatever demons lie within the organs, you are also fighting a battle yourself - in mind, body, and spirit. Once you are diagnosed with a chronic disease, it's a fight for your life. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are struggling just to stay alive, or just to survive, but it means that you will struggle with loss, grief, a myriad of emotions, and daily obstacles - some expected, some unforeseen.
I think that we all have this fight within ourselves in the most general sense. Most of us spend our lives attempting to find the truest of all answers to the following questions:
Who am I?
What is my purpose?
How can I live my best life?
We are all trying to determine who we are as individuals, and then continuously fighting to be true to ourselves and who we believe we are or were meant to be.
Illness is essentially an added obstacle to that quest. When illness prevents us from being or doing what we feel is our divine purpose, we feel cheated.
It is a fight, constantly, between our desires and our physical limitations. (Or mental, or spiritual, or physiological, etc...).
I came across this quote the other day. It is from the book
The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye by David Lagercrantz, and the excerpt was discussing and referencing a poem called Water Lilies by Gunnar Ekelöf:
"He could sink to the bottom, proud and rebellious, raging against the pain, the incontinence, the immobility, all the humiliation."
The truth is, we are all progressing slowly towards death. Illness can speed things up - not always, but sometimes. What is even more clear is that illness speeds up the process of suffering from episodes of pain, incontinence, and all kinds of symptoms. Not only is it uncomfortable (to say the least) but it truly can be humiliating.
Rather than lying back and accepting our situation without any push-back, we can go out fighting. We can fight for a better quality of life. We can fight for some pain relief, however minimal. We can find ways to cope with incontinence and pain and immobility, no matter at what age, and fight against all of the limitations that these unfortunate symptoms can create.
We can say - yes I am ill, but I will love my life! I will love my life because I will make certain that my life includes love and light and is full of exciting adventures and opportunities!! I will clench my fists and allow my words and my actions to immortalize my fight against the illnesses that have fought against me for so long.
The part of chronic illness that is equally uplifting and infuriating is that you will have several chances to get back up. The infuriating part is that humiliation is part of the package, and it will happen over and over again. The uplifting part is that even though you are brought down and you feel broken, it passes and allows you to get up again. You become better at handling your own struggles and coping with your own demons. You learn.
I will continue to fight to be exactly who I am and I will learn new ways of coping and fighting and dealing with these health-related road blocks.
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